Why your story isn't recced...

[amalthia]

Okay so your story is beta read, you're getting a ton of feedback, chances are I may have left feedback but I'm not reccing it, so what's going on?

There is a good chance you're hitting one of my biggest pet peeves. Posting a completed story over a period of days instead of all at once. If I find the story after it's all parts are posted there is a good chance I'll rec and feedback the fic...but lately because I am actively reading and looking for fics I'm running into this more often.

I rarely leave feedback for these stories and I'll probably never recommend the story unless enough years go by and I completely forget the author did that to the story. (but honestly, I'm not likely to forget because it gets to me on so many levels anytime I see the story I get upset all over again)

Now some people may be wondering..."but you recommend WIP..." yeah well I never said I was rational. For some reason WIP don't make me upset the same way. I wrote about this once trying to figure out why WIP work better than completed stories that are chopped into pieces...I think WIP have better story flow than completed stories that break off at an arbitrary word count number.

I guess for me I feel like the author is jerking my chain by not posting the entire story at once. It feels like a cheap ploy to gain more feedback and well this whole deal pisses me off. (I know this probably isn't the reason why some authors decide to post their completed fic over a period of days but I don't understand if the story is complete why not post it all at once and if it's not finished then why is the author saying it's complete?)

Anyway, I've been seeing this around a bit more lately and I'm baffled.

Comments

[amireal.livejournal.com]

I've had this discussion with people when I posted "And Be One Traveler" And there was actual shock when I suggested that people should control their own reading and here I broke it up for you, how is that different than if I'd posted it once a day? How is that LESS scary? There's 10 LJ posts, it would still be the same length if I'd spent 10 days posting. Go, chew in small bites. And people who want it all at once could go to the website.

But there is this real (and completely not comprehensible to me) fear of long stories.

[amalthia]

I don't get that either! I loved how you posted And Be One Traveler...okay it did take me a bit of time to read but I read it at my own pace and I loved it!

Sometimes I feel patronized when authors refuse to post their completed story because it's "epic at 20k words!" It feels like they think I can't read a long story in one go or it'll break my brain or something.

[diluvian.livejournal.com]

Personally, I can *feel* my eyes dilate with excitement when I find a long story and that little pip on the right-hand slider bar gets smaller... and smaller, as the page loads. Eeeeee!

::baffled by them other folks::

[xylohypha.livejournal.com]

Here via yin_again, and I have the same reaction that you do. Ooooh, a story I can get my teeth into! I have yet to meet a story whose length is sufficient to scare me.